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Jyotsna Srikanth
Lucy Ward JYOTSNA SRIKANTH
Call Of Bangalore Riverboat Records TUGCD1072
Call of Bangalore is a voyage clean through the often illusory gap between improvisa- tion and composition
in Karnatic music, piloted by Jyotsna Srikanth and her south Indian violin. In musical instru- ment terms, the violin is the subcontinent’s longest-established European export. It is structurally unchanged from its western coun- terpart although tuned to the needs and dic- tates of ragam. The other (again non-struc- tural) change is that it is played, as in many of Europe’s folk, non-classical, dance and nautical traditions, resting on the collarbone or upper chest region instead of beneath the chin.
Jyotsna Srikanth’s œuvre criss-crosses gen- res – two other styles, not featured here, are Indo-jazz fusion and film tunes. However, orig- inally it was seeing her respond live in concert either to the vocal dexterity of Dr M Balamura- likrishna and Aruna Sairam or the ethereal sounds of the chitravina maestro N Ravikiran that flagged her up as a violinist to keep tabs on. Call Of Bangalore comes special delivery.
It is bare-boned, instrumentally speak- ing. Patri Satish Kumar plays mridangam, the south’s pre-eminent double-headed barrel drum, and N Amruth the small frame drum called kanjira. Her violin’s tone is, by and large, sweet, but as the 40-minute centre- piece, the album’s tour-de-force, Brovabara- ma reveals, she is not averse to adding a dash or splash of sour into the recipe at times. Call
Of Bangalore is her recorded work that, thus far, best reveals her classical talents and it ele- vates her to the position of a major principal soloist. Accompanist or soloist, purist or adventurer, she is a major instrumentalist of vision and imagination.
www.worldmusic.net Ken Hunt
LUCY WARD Single Flame Navigator 083
You can get quite a long way through the sheer force of a win- ning personality. Ward’s 2011 debut album Adelphi Has To Fly, a competent but limited calling card for her act loaded with familiar crowd pleasers, ended up with a clutch of absurdly over-enthusiastic reviews and a BBC Folk Award. However, the demanding self-composed song that gave the album its title hinted that a more complex talent lurked beneath the gung-ho exuber- ance – an impression confirmed by her subse- quent single For The Dead Men, an impres- sively constructed and coldly angry rallying call to protest.
It showed a deeper, much darker side to
her that’s evident again here and which explodes with such extraordinarily powerful resonance on this album, she’s barely recog- nisable as the singer who gave us Adelphi Has To Fly. In two years she’s blossomed into a challenging songwriter and a richly involving singer with mature and accomplished
arrangements sweltering in strings and Stu Hanna’s distinctively bold production tech- nique. Serious notice of intent is announced at the outset by a single drum beat before – sounding like a brooding cross between June Tabor and Nico – she delivers her opening lines “We sung the songs of Safka/candles in the rain” (from I Cannot Say I Will Not Speak) and you’re instantly intrigued. What the hell does a 23-year-old know about Melanie Safka anyway? It’s a song of one generation’s failed dreams… and another generation’s prevail- ing hopes. Naïve perhaps but an involving theme all the same.
The album is full of hefty topics – The
Last Pirouette is a Richard Thompson-esque drama about the end of the world, apparent- ly based on one of her father’s poems; Rites Of Man is a somewhat spooky ecological anthem; Marching Through The Green Grass adapts a traditional song collected in the Appalachians by Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles into a vigorous drum-driven chorus; and the closing Shellback – apparently the first song she ever wrote – is a compassionate tale about the effects of war.
Particularly brave are the unaccompa-
nied The Consequence, with its winsome har- monies addressing the honour killing of Shafilea Ahmed; and the similarly bleak Lord, I Don’t Want To Die In The Storm, another American traditional song that Ward and Stu Hanna have set to a new tune around an evocative banjo arrangement.
The frothy folk funster has gone with
the blue hair. Lucy Ward has grown up…
www.lucywardsings.com
Colin Irwin
Photo: Elly Lucas
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